A little personal news - after a little over three and a half years from the sale of FeedBurner to Google, I have decided to move on - and left Google about two weeks ago. I've taken a few weeks off and have just gotten around to updating this blog with that news.
As I led the negotiations pre-sale and post-sale integration activities of merging FeedBurner into Google, and have always looked at Google as a place I liked and wanted to be, it was a difficult decision, but it was definitely time.
Most recently I had been working with the Mobile Display Advertising and AdMob team on their rich media strategy and implementation, and I'm glad I had the chance to work with that talented team, but I felt that was in a good place with some new product managers that joined the team, so the time was right to move on.
This will read like a lot of these blog posts - I have no regrets, and Google was an amazing place to work and learn. From a technologist's perspective, it's hard to imagine a place that can put more interesting pieces of technology in front of you on a daily basis than Google.
Mostly, though, I'll miss the collection of smart and talented people I had the chance to interact with on a daily basis. Watching how Susan Wojcicki, whom I had the pleasure of working for my entire time there, built and operated her team was a model for how any product executive should run business at Google's scale - and although she doesn't get enough credit for Google's success, I'm hoping her new role as the SVP of the Ads business unit will bring that. Bringing Product and Engineering together under one leader is the right thing to do in all these announced focus areas, in my opinion. It should have happened a long time ago.
What's next for me? I'm taking some time to figure that out with the many people I've met before, during, and after working at Google, while continuing to advise and invest in the startup community where I think I can offer value. I also have a few ideas of my own I'll be incubating.
I hope to finally have a little time to pick up the guitar again - music is something I spent countless hours on earlier in life but just dropped off for me around the time we started FeedBurner. And hopefully, I can write here a little more often - I have a ton to say about my experience with FeedBurner and Google that I think can help other entrepreneurs.
I'll post more news here when I have some!
1 comment:
Great post Steve. Looking forward to reading more of your posts and hearing more about what you focus your energies on next.
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